IAWIS Focus Conference
University of Ulster, Belfast, 4 - 6 June 2010
Keynote speaker: Professor WJT Mitchell, University of Chicago
This conference will bring together word and image, as well as literary scholarship, art history and theory, art practice, curatorial practice, museology, and visual culture, in order to address the interrelationship between word & image and display.
The questions addressed will include: How does the art exhibition function as mediator of literature? Which approaches to Word and Image are specific to curators or museum practitioners? How do Word and Image studies theorize, inform or imply display? We also wish to investigate the use of text/writing in and surrounding exhibitions, and the semiotics of museums' visual identities. How do competencies interact in the tri-disciplinary field between (1) art/art history/theory, (2) museum studies/curatorial practice and (3) literary studies? How are competencies acquired, and how do policies and funding structures enable work in this field?
We seek with this conference to (in)form a network that will investigate literary art exhibitions and work on relevant outputs. A publication on the conference theme will be produced.
Keynote Lecture by W. J. T. Mitchell, 6pm Saturday 5 June
"Idolatry: Nietzsche, Blake, Poussin"
W. J. T. Mitchell is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History, University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. Under his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago's prestigious Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. His publications include: "The Pictorial Turn," Artforum, March 1992; "What Do Pictures Want?" October, Summer 1996; What Do Pictures Want? (2005); The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998); Picture Theory (1994); Art and the Public Sphere (1993); Landscape and Power (1992); Iconology (1987); The Language of Images (1980); On Narrative (1981); and The Politics of Interpretation (1984).
Professor Mitchell will also be presenting a public lecture on Wednesday, 2 June in Trinity College, Dublin. For more information, please visit: www.tcd.ie/History_of_Art/triarc/research/ArtandEnvironment.php
Dr Karen Brown or Dr Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes: DisplayingWandI@ulster.ac.uk
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